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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Faith is the primary component of both Evolutionism and Creationism. "Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in
inexhaustible streams the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that
has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of men. Through it, God will
spread His word; a spring of pure truth shall flow from it; like a new
star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light
hithertofore unknown to shine among men."-Johannes Gutenberg

Faith is the primary component of both Darwinism and Creationism. This post investigates the faith ingredient of science. The Creationist believes that the Word of God is authoritative. The Bible is correct when it speaks to history and accurate when it speaks to science. The Bible is God's written way of communicating to mankind, showing us the way to Heaven after this life and the way to relationship with God during this life. While Creation Science is almost entirely involved in investigating the natural world, the eyewitness account of creation by God is considered authoritative. Creation Science believes in God as Creator and the Bible as Truth. Therefore God did indeed create the Universe and all that is material existence, including time itself and all the laws and forces of nature.

Christians believe that Jesus Christ came to Earth as the Messiah and did indeed both take the sins of the world upon Himself and also conquer death and Hell by rising from the dead and, after spending some time with His followers, returned to His place with God the Father and Spirit. We find salvation in accepting Jesus' sacrifice for us and becoming new creatures, reborn within as the Spirit of God replaces the dead spirit we inherited from our ancestors.Darwinist Science (Naturalistic Materialistic Humanism) has faith that God did NOT create and that the Bible is NOT true or of any use. All supernatural causes are arbitrarily ruled out no matter what the investigation of evidence may seem to logically conclude. Darwinists are the modern day version of the CHURCH/STATE of the Middle Ages, determined to stifle dissension and censor and hide information from the common man. Darwinists deny God and deny that God created the Universe or life or information and ignore any evidence that is uncomfortable. In fact Darwinists work very hard to censor any non-Darwinist information. The NCSE is nothing but an organization designed to censor the information students will learn. Just as the CHURCH/STATE of the Middle Ages took a hard line against the common man being allowed to read or interpret the Bible and defended axiomatic science like a herd of Musk Oxen circling around their young, Darwinists rule the worlds of academia and science and also the news and entertainment media.

Occam's Razor has been tossed in the trashcan by the modern Darwinist. History has been rewritten and evidence has been twisted until it cries out in pain, as Burke said: “Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.”―
Edmund Burke

The most important event in Martin Luther's life was also the spark for one of the most important events in the history of modern man and that event began perhaps the most important movement in the history of Western Civilization. The Reformation! Powered by Christians, this was the impetus for a new kind of science, a new kind of church and a new world for mankind. Not the Renaissance. A bunch of elitists making art and music, which is perfectly fine, was noteworthy but it was the Christians who remade society. Luther's actions were the fulcrum and Christian priests who believed in scientific pursuits and the education of all men were the lever that changed the Western world.

Martin Luther, a priest, was reading from the
Book of Habakkuk or from Paul's quote of Habbakuk in either Romans 1 or Galatians 3. The words were life-changing even though he certainly had read them before. THE JUST SHALL LIVE BY HIS FAITH! In honor of the event I am using an older
translation of the Bible (albeit published over 50 years after his death) although Luther could read Hebrew and Greek, he himself had translated the Bible into German in order to make it available to everyone in his nation.

Habakkuk 2:4 - 1599 Geneva Bible (GNV)

"Behold, he that lifteth up himself, his mind is not upright in him, but the just shall live by his faith"

THE
CHURCH had become a something quite unlike the church. THE CHURCH
incorporated the rulers of nations, cities, all the rich and influential
families into an unrecognizable tyrannical entity that was a confusing
amalgam of greedy and evil people mixed in with the devout and earnest,
all in positions of leadership of some kind. Some of the greatest
philosophers and scientists of the era were priests. But rape and
infidelity and of course the infamous indulgences were a curse on the
monstrous overstuffed behemoth THE CHURCH had become. Indulgences were
money paid to priests in order to "buy" their sins or the sins of a
passed-away relative of other love ones, supposedly getting them out
of hell or purgatory in exchange for filthy lucre. It was the CHURCH/STATE and it was tyrannical, especially to the peasants who were completely at the mercy of their rulers.

Such practices were abhorrent to Luther but it was a moment of sudden clarity when he read the words"... the just shall live by his faith."

Luther
grasped the concept. People do NOT receive God's mercy from paying
priests or having priests pray for you or giving massive amounts of money to a church. Faith in the redeeming work of CHRIST is the one
and only way to peace with God.

The beauty and grandeur of this idea finally brought Luther to the point of presenting his
95 theses to church leadership. It is unlikely that he actually nailed them to the door of the Wittenburg church, which would be counterintuitive to his purpose. He wanted to awaken the rulers to their grave errors which were counter to scripture. His attack on the non-Christian behavior of
church leaders and their cohorts led to his eventual condemnation and
excommunication from THE CHURCH. But Luther's actions were the
spearhead of the Protestant movement which brought about the
Reformation.

There were several influential Christians who paved the way for Luther's pivotal assertions that would eventually put an end to the ruling paradigm of elitists who worshiped Power, Ptolemy and Pfennigs above God. The desire to worship God by investigating His world and the belief that a Logical God would make a world that could be investigated lifted the chains from the common man and ended the so-called Dark Ages. It was a line of clerics who build modern science and presented it to us and we should acknowledge their valor and vigor.Actually learning (during the so-called Dark Ages) continued as the elites founded schools and colleges. But as the church and the ruling class began to join forces, the resulting CHURCH/STATE was a haven to some of the most ruthless and ungodly of people and philosophies. The Jesuits promoted the idea of doing evil to bring about a greater good (in the eyes of the Jesuits). In fact, when the Protestant movement/Reformation began, there was actual warfare at times between those who separated from the Holy Roman Empire and its remnants and those who wanted the old ways to continue. In short, the Renaissance was a rebirth of learning and seeking for elitists. But it was the Reformation which brought this learning to the common man as the iron rule of the elitists was broken and the world of the peasants was provided real hope of an upward path.

Modern science was born in the minds of men like Grossteste and Bacon. The axiomatic idea that the ancients knew the truth and their thoughts would rule science was backwards. Yet it was the mainstream way of thinking. Just as the Darwinist concept that science must be limited by naturalism, which is an artificial barrier to discovery today, mankind had become chained to the pronouncements of a few respected philosophers and a CHURCH/STATE that had as much resemblance to the church Jesus Christ and his followers had started as a Banana Slug has to a Monarch Butterfly. The adulterous mix of a ruling class of elites and minds closed tight as an alarmed clam caused mankind in the Western world to be full of ignorant peasants, a small class of merchants and above them all, the elitist royals and clerics and their rich relatives. People were beaten and killed for the crime of even owning a Bible. Islam became an impetus for a horde of invaders seeking to conquer the world and impose their belief system on the West. As we know, the Crusades did defeat the Islamists and logic won over mainstream beliefs back then. Funny, isn't it, that in some ways we are finding the world beginning to look a bit like the Middle Ages again?

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
―
Edmund Burke

Yes, the likelihood that Noah and his sons came from a highly advanced society is strong. The very few artifacts found in coal include metals we do not know how to reproduce. However, imagine that we experienced the same thing. All of the machines and infrastructure and EVERYTHING gone, replaced by a world of mudrock and mounds of vegetation and muck. You step out into a world where all the things you know how to operate are gone. So it was their lot to make things of wood and stone. Yet their descendents made amazingly designed buildings and devices, some of which modern engineers still cannot accomplish with all the technology of our times.

Men like Aristarchus (310 - 230 B.C.) and Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) actually used a form of the scientific method. Not only did mankind know the Earth was a globe long before Christ (and this was written in the Bible in Isaiah 40:22 even before that) but Aristarchus was able to determine the relative sizes of the Sun, Moon and Earth. Eratosthenes (276 - 195 B.C.) used geometry to determine the circumference of the Earth and the tilt of the Earth's axis. His Sieve was a means of calculating prime numbers. Archimedes (287-212 B.C) was a brilliant scientist and inventor of his day, well known for his use of calculus and discovery of hydrostatics as well as inventing the Archimedes Screw and an actual death ray. Much like a Da Vinci of his day, he was called upon to invent weapons of war and had ideas far ahead of his time. In fact many ancients in India and China invented marvelous machines and discovered important scientific principles as well. Unfortunately, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, although brilliant, led mankind to adopt an axiomatic view of science. Ptolemy's view of the Solar System was accepted as dogma and axiomatic science was adopted by the mainstream rulers and thinkers. To excerpt from Coppedge's fantastic online science history site:

Now that we have seen how the underlying philosophical assumptions essential
to a scientific outlook were most exhibited within a Christian culture, how specifically did modern science
get started in Europe? It helps to put some personality to these otherwise abstract concepts.
In this section, we wish to introduce some key thinkers, medieval to Renaissance, that were prologue to
the scientific age.

The so-called Dark Ages were not entirely dark The derogatory term “Dark Ages” is partly a
construct of the Enlightenment that wished to distance itself from the Scholastic philosophers, but there
were bright lights of scientific thought that antedated that so-called Age of Reason. Let’s take
a moment to review the interval from the time of Christ to 1000 A.D., the beginning of our scientific timeline.

From 1 to 1000 A.D.

The First Millennium was a turbulent age. It is difficult for science to flourish without some
political and economic stability. During the first 1000 years after Christ, the world saw a decaying
Roman Empire split into two, and eventually sacked by barbaric tribes. For the first three and
a half centuries, Christians were a despised and persecuted group, tortured by waves of intense persecution,
seeking to keep alive the light of Christ’s message of salvation while huddled in dark catacombs and
other secret places of worship. When Constantine finally ended the persecution in 313 A.D. and made
Christianity the state religion, Christians suffered an even worse threat: the corruption of their core
beliefs. It become increasingly common for pastors and teachers to compromise the integrity
of Christian doctrine through political ambition and personal greed. Christendom slowly became an unhealthy
mix of Christian and pagan traditions.

The Eastern church fell to the Muslims, while the Western
church became, by the middle ages, a ruthless political power, exercising its domination over governments and
peasants alike, often with utter disregard for the simplicity of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Furthermore,
while the populace became more ignorant of the Scriptures, church leaders grew increasingly fond
of Greek philosophy. Individual curiosity about the world and its workings were suppressed on two
fronts: the necessity to subsist, and the fear of transgressing official church dogma. There was
one institution that kept the flame of Scriptural truth from flickering out: the monasteries.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1230-45 - Robert Grossteste's campaign for literacy, his advocacy for freedom from Papal authority and the study of nature as a Godly pursuit make the Bishop of Lincoln and Oxford theologian crucial to the future of science. He actually devised a scientific method of study that was the opposite of the axiomatic way of thinking held by the ruling class.

1266 - Roger Bacon, Grossteste's protege, proposes an encyclopedia of knowledge be made and finds himself expected to produce it. Two years later he publishes a treatise on experimental science. His fellow Bacon, Sir Francis, now gets credit for the formulation of the Scientific Method, but Grossteste and Roger Bacon formulated it in basic form first.

1350-80 - Nicholas of Oresme, the "Einstein of the Middle Ages", published works that were seminal to the later work of Descartes, Newton and Galieo (in fact Galileo simply copied the earlier scholar's work is his Discorsi in a blatant act of plagiarism).

1450 - Gutenberg's printing press begins making Bibles. The first modern press produced the Gutenberg Bible and therefore was instrumental in bringing literacy to the common man. While it was not technically the first printing press, it was the first efficient press and it allowed the Bible to be printed in quantity rather than laboriously hand-copied.

1517 - Luther posts his 95 Theses, charges against THE CHURCH/STATE including decrying the practice of indulgences. The mainstream ruling paradigm was challenged thereby.

1521 - Luther is excommunicated. The two events (the theses and his excommunication) begin the modern Protestant movement. Luther, John Calvin and others formed church organizations which taught that the Bible rather than decrees of ruling priests had the authority.

1543 - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies is published as the aged Nicolai Copernicus lay on his deathbed. The publication signaled the beginning of the end of Geocentricism and Axiomatic science as well. "Roger BaconScholastic methodology also
violated one of the fundamental precepts of Platonic humanism, that
studying the world as it is rather than as we think it should be (or as
other people think it is) can lead us to knowledge of God. Roger Bacon
(ca. 1214-1294) understood this far better than most people in his era." -Christians Who Changed Their World (part 14)

We could talk of Da Vinci, Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Kelvin, Maxwell and so many other Christians and Theists who advanced science from simply an aspect of philosophy to a field of study onto itself, holding within it multiple disciplines. We eventually come to Francis Bacon's Scientific Methodology:

The inductive method (usually called the scientific method) is the
deductive method "turned upside down". The deductive method starts
with a few true statements (axioms) with the goal of proving many
true statements (theorems) that logically follow from them. The
inductive method starts with many observations
of nature, with the goal of finding a few, powerful statements about
how nature works (laws and theories).

In the deductive method, logic is the authority. If a statement
follows logically from the axioms of the system, it must be true. In
the scientific method, observation of nature is the authority. If an
idea conflicts with what happens in nature, the idea must be changed
or abandoned.

Here is a diagram that attempts to depict the scientific
(inductive) method. It is oversimplified and incomplete, but...

The fatal flaw of Darwinism is the refusal to understand that the Supernatural MUST be superior to the natural and therefore, although only the natural can be investigated, the Supernatural must be considered as a cause or an answer to the questions that come from investigation. Why does a football drop back down to Earth after a punter kicks it many yards above the ground and many yards down the field? Gravity. Why are organisms so intricately and amazingly designed? They had a Designer! We can only investigate the natural and only right now. We need historical records to tell us of the past and imaginations to see the future in uncertain terms. We can only investigate in the here and now. Science cannot say exactly how gravity works but it is accepted. Science cannot say how God created, so He is not accepted. Do you see the dichotomy? Do you see the hypocrisy?

The Laws of Thermodynamics and the Law of Biogenesis preclude Darwinism from being correct. Does that stop them? Nope. They just decide that the Laws are no longer laws or that they do not apply to their pet hypothesis. There is no piece of evidence that will convince a Darwinist. Because it is not his mind that leads him. It is faith. Faith that there is no God and that the Bible is not authoritative and that natural causes are the only causes that can be considered. They do not see all the miracles that Darwinism requires as miracles because they are blind to truth. *Poof* made the Universe, life, time, information and scientific laws. Darwinism depends on miracles without the God required to power them.

So Christians were the primary force behind freeing the Western world from tyranny but also freeing the scientific mind from axiomatic to investigative thinking. Most of the influential men who advanced science in the Middle Ages were priests, for priests and rulers were the people who were educated and given access to books. You will find very few great scientists from Victor of Hugo to Pasteur and Lister who were NOT Christians or at the very least Theists. But a second Dark Age was ushered in by the publication of works by Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. A world of elitists hungry for an intellectual excuse to abandon any responsibility to God and anxious to establish a Humanist society led to works authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and eventually Adolf Hitler. Eugenics was invented by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, and it has led to world-wide baby murdering on demand and even by demand. Fascism and Communism are Socialist schemes that produced the three bloodthirstiest nations of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union, Red China and Nazi Germany. Fascist Socialism has infested the United States to the point that Jefferson and Franklin would hardly recognize us.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
―
Edmund Burke

O sing a new song, to our God above,
Avoid profane ones, ’tis for holy choir:
Let Israel sing song of holy love
To him that made them, with their hearts on fire:
Let Zion’s sons lift up their voice, and sing
Carols and anthems to their heavenly king.
Let not your voice alone his praise forth tell,
But move withal, and praise him in the dance;
Cymbals and harps, let them be tuned well,
’Tis he that doth the poor’s estate advance:
Do this not only on the solemn days,
But on your secret beds your spirits raise.

O let the saints bear in their mouth his praise,
And a two-edged sword drawn in their hand,
Therewith for to revenge the former days,
Upon all nations, that their zeal withstand;
To bind their kings in chains of iron strong,
And manacle their nobles for their wrong.
Expect the time, for ’tis decreed in heaven,
Such honor shall unto his saints be given.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Very early on in the life of this blog, I published a couple of posts on the problem with naturalism taking over science and bringing on Scientism. The plan was to bring up the ideas of the natural and the supernatural as applied to science to settle early on that real science does not hide from the direction the evidence takes it.

Once you read these two posts, you will be ready for the next article in which I hopefully explain exactly how Darwinism and Creationism are different and how they are the same. Hope you will read them, they are both quite short and to the point, thanks!

I will change the format from the old style to the new for the sake of continuity.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Should science be limited to the study of the known natural world and
its systems? Or is the job and goal of science to seek knowledge no
matter where that may take the searcher? In other words, do we limit
scientific study to the natural only?

I can hear the cries of
researchers studying the paranormal as they scramble to justify their
grant monies! Creation scientists and those who fall into the
Intelligent Design category will immediately disagree.

1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. 2. Such activities restricted to explaining a limited class of natural phenomena. 3. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study. 4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.

So only item 2 mentions the necessity of confining one's studies strictly to the supernatural. And what is the supernatural?

The same source yields: adj. 1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world. 2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces. 3. Of or relating to a deity. 4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous. 5. Of or relating to the miraculous.

The
first two definitions of "supernatural" do not mention a deity at all,
simply some power or existence beyond what is known to be natural.

Doesn't
it follow that the best scientist would not turn away from evidence
that pointed in a supernatural direction? To do so makes for bad
science, for in so doing the scientist is failing to make every effort
to pursue all possibilities. Ignoring evidence that points to
supernatural activities or powers from prejudice or religious preference
is undoubtedly an everyday occurrence in the scientific community but
that does not make it best practice. You can be sure that Stephen
Hawking and Albert Einstein never thought in that way. Great thinkers
allow for all possibilities so as not to miss the truth.

My
conclusion is as follows: One looks to natural processes to explain all phenomena first, but one must be willing to follow evidence into the
realm of the supernatural if that is where the evidence leads. Those who are unwilling to do so are allowing their prejudices to diminish their effectiveness as researchers.

There are three basic views scientists take of mixing the natural and
the supernatural. Some make a decision to exclude the possibility of
the supernatural, some make a decision to look for the supernatural and
some just search for truth and will accept what they find either way.
The standard Darwinist propaganda is that good scientists look for the
answers in science only in the natural world and exclude all
supernatural possibilities.

There is a faction of scientists who
exclude the supernatural from their possibilites not on the basis of
science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:

"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.

"I
had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently
assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find
satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for
most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was
essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was
simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system,
and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the
morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."- Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}

"We
[scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are
forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an
apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material
explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot
allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.

"The
Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a
more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer
believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer
can cure after medicine fails."- H. L. Mencken “[I suppose the reason] we all jumped at the Origin [of Species] was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.”- Julian Huxley, British biologist.View from the flipside

Last
year Anthony Flew, a noted anti-creationist, atheistis philosopher who
had lectured and debated on the side of Darwinism for decades, made a
stir in the scientific community with this statement:"It is, for
example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one
single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia
Britannica put together...It now seems to me that the findings of more
than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and
enormously powerful argument to design."

"When I began
my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced
atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be
writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of
Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are
straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand
them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic
of my own special branch of physics."- Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.

Many scientists see the supernatural in their work

Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): "Astronomy
leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of
nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly
the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying
(one might say 'supernatural') plan."

"The statistical
probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized
reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident,
is zero." - Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry.

Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): "A
common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect
has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and
that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The
numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to
put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy):"I
find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has
to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the
explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead
of nothing." Believers are numerous in the scientific community

"I
was reminded of this a few months ago when I saw a survey in the
journal Nature. It revealed that 40% of American physicists, biologists
and mathematicians believe in God--and not just some metaphysical
abstraction, but a deity who takes an active interest in our affairs and
hears our prayers: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."- Jim Holt. 1997. Science Resurrects God. The Wall Street Journal (December 24, 1997), Dow Jones & Co., Inc.

Alexander Polyakov (Soviet mathematician): "We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it."

Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics): "It
seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the
universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers
are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own
life."

Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist): "The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine."

Believers dominate the ranks of great scientists of the past"The
wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in
the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my
greatest comprehension." - Isaac Newton

Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer) "I
find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge
the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the
universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances
of science."

"Overwhelming evidences of an
intelligence and benevolent intention surround us, show us the whole of
nature through the work of a free will and teach us that all alive
beings depend on an eternal creator-ruler." - Lord Kelvin

"I
am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like
Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like
all great astronomers and mathematicians of the past." - Augustin Louis Cauchy

Conclusion

There
is room for both believers and non-believers in the scientific
community. Some, like Einstein, will come to science with a readiness
to believe in God but will remain unconvinced. Others, like Tipler,
find their predisposition to ignore God tossed aside in the face of the
evidence they have found in their research. My personal belief is that
the more we learn about life and the cosmos, the more compelling the
evidence will be that God does exist and did, indeed create all things.
I leave the last word to Sir Francis:"A little science estranges a man from God; a lot of science brings him back."Sir Francis Bacon

The most famed iteration of Fleetwood Mac was probably the Mick Fleetwood/John McVie/Christine McVie/Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham group who produced"Tusk"as well as the best known FM album, "Rumors." Fleetwood Mac became known as a pop rock band with some experimental leanings. But did you know that originally the band was a blues band fronted by famed blues guitarist Peter Green? What? Who is Peter Green? Well, he was once considered a young guitarist who was capable of becoming better than Eric Clapton...until he dropped some acid at a commune. Spin the story as you like, he dropped out of Fleetwood Mac and had stays in mental wards as a schizophrenic. His life was erratic following the commune incident.Darwinism started as a Pagan concept of the world actually creating itself, a worship of Mother Nature, if you will. Darwin proposed evolution as a slow-but-sure process by which mutations would turn one kind of animal into another over time. With the idea of a uniform geological column, very possibly an eternal and boundless Universe and so few good fossils, Darwin could hope that transitional forms would begin popping up in the fossil record to support his theory. Then again, Peter Green thought the jamming he did at that commune was the best stuff he ever did. But Green actually was never quite the same and that is sad. So no more Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac blasting out the blues and, soon, the band was NOT a blues band at all.Then again, there is no geological column and the rocks are catastrophic in nature, the Universe is neither boundless nor eternal and transitional forms are still not there. So Origins Science isn't what you think or have been told...

Yesterday's gone. We will seek to match science to modern findings in this series.
We can succeed.My job is to get you to see clearly the foundations of both viewpoints and then view the evidence from both viewpoints. What will you believe after you see ALL the eividence and lies change?

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

From the beginning of this blog, when discussing science, it was proposed to the reader that every single one of you has assumptions by which you live. You do not wake up in the morning with a blank sheet of paper for a mind. You have underlying assumptions by which you make decisions today and by which you have decided to do things in the past. I am not simply talking about science, in fact science itself is an offshoot of philosophy and philosophy underlies all of science. So kick about what I say about Darwinism all you like, but before you do...let's try something different. Let's go back and make sure the foundational aspect of what people both believe and assert to others and defend is apparent to all. It begins with assumptions for EVERYONE.Like directions, if you are not at the right starting point you will not end up in the right place. Once I lived in Monterey, California. If I took the first right and then the first left and went about four blocks until I came to a major T intersection, I could then turn left and bear right to drive by what we called the "Seal Pier" (although they were actually Sea Lions and it was actually the Coast Guard Pier) and if I kept driving past the pier area I would be in Cannery Row. If I followed the exact same directions from my old house in South Bend, Indiana I would wind up on a highway that would not hit a T intersection but rather keep going South to Indianapolis and beyond. Exact same directions, different starting point. If I If you begin with a worldview that limits answers to naturalistic ones only, you might NEVER get to an answer. If you begin with a worldview that allows for all possibilities and apply Occam's Razor, you will find yourself having great difficulty not being in agreement with the ID guys if not a Creationist. I did mention that Evolution is absolutely built on worldview rather than evidence...

Scientific American devoted the first five points of its article on ‘creationist nonsense’ to defending evolution against charges that it’s not good science. In this chapter we will look at each in turn, but first it’s absolutely essential to define terms carefully. How can you know whether something is ‘true science’ or ‘just a theory,’ unless you know what these terms mean? Yet evolutionists often make sweeping claims without adequately defining their terms.

The 16th century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, considered the founder of the scientific method, gave a pretty straightforward definition of science:

This view of science, however, depends on two major philosophical assumptions: causality and induction, which must be accepted by faith. Many modern scientists are so ignorant of basic philosophy that they don’t even realize they have made these assumptions, although several philosophers, such as David Hume and Bertrand Russell, have pointed it out.1

The editors of Scientific American and other leading evolutionists define ‘science’ in a self-serving way that excludes God and His Word. They openly equate science with the philosophy of ‘methological naturalism’ as has already been shown ‘to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.’ [SA 85]

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.2

Most people think that ‘science’ follows the evidence wherever it leads. But it is impossible to avoid letting our worldview color our interpretation of the facts. Creationists are honest about the philosophical basis behind their interpretation, whereas naturalists often pretend that they don’t operate from any philosophical bias. The late atheist Stephen Jay Gould, unlike many of his peers, was candid about this bias:

Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots is self-serving mythology.3

The philosopher of science David Hull had earlier noted:

… science is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of observations within the framework of a theory.4

Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University, was candid about how certain conclusions would be avoided at all costs, regardless of the evidence:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.5

1. D. Batten, ‘It’s Not Science.’2. R. Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons, New York Review (9 January 1997): p. 31; Amazing admission.3. S.J. Gould, Natural History 103(2):14, 1994.4. D. Hull, The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy Two Thousand Years of Stasis (II), British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16(61):1–18, 1965.5. S.C. Todd, correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423 (30 September 1999); A designer is unscientific—even if all the evidence supports one!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Can you see that Darwinists have conned the public into believing that science is limited to naturalistic conclusions, powers and origins? They admit to "absurdity" and "failure" in association with naturalism when applied to the real world. They admit to refusals to consider the supernatural even if " ...all the data point to an intelligent designer..."In other words, while normal scientists before Darwin and both Creation scientists and Intelligent Design scientists will consider both natural and supernatural causes for origins or phenomena, the Darwinist will intentionally ignore ANY AND ALL EVIDENCE THAT DOES NOT SATISFY HIS METAPHYSICAL SIDE! This is not science, it is religion!There is no reason we should allow them to impose this nonsense on young people! Force-feeding Darwinism to students is tantamount to child abuse. Nonsense presented as fact while being supported by no evidence but rather a rather involved set of stories and suppositions and outright lies? This is what your kids are taught in school today. Haeckel's chart was exposed as a fraud within months of its presentation and we still find it in some school textbooks today. I still have Darwinist commenters who think devolution and speciation is a problem for Creationists when it is actually mainline Creation Science Biology 101.If the Laws of Thermodynamics are true, then the natural world COULD NOT create itself and a supernatural force or mind must have been the creative force. It is entirely unreasonable to limit science to naturalism and in fact I would argue it is unscientific. Darwinists have become the new Luddites!!!

In a metaphysical purple haze, the Darwinist is unable to see the continually mounting evidence against his pet belief system.

Now we will begin explaining why Creation Science is indeed science and far better science than Darwinism!

Sunday, April 21, 2013

I will not support any online site that resorts to lies. As often explained, this is why I have declared all blog posts and articles by Kent Hovind to be unreliable and, on the other side, have warned all readers to ignore the falsehoods spread by talkorigins.org as well. For instance, this is a picture of a carcass that fooled the Japanese people, National Geographic and quite a few scientists and amateurs like myself at first:

Anyone can be mistaken. Plenty of people thought that a carcass brought up from the sea by a Japanese trawler was that of a Plesiosaur...until we came to find out that it was in fact the remains of a Basking Shark! But the Japanese had already put out a stamp with the image of the supposed ancient animal before further investigation ruled out a saurian creature.

Hovind's Dr. Dino website continued to advertise this carcass as a saurian after it was proved to be a shark. Therefore that and some other unfortunate events convinced me to avoid any information coming from Kent Hovind at all. So even though his site was devoted to supporting Creationism, the willingness to be willingly deceptive is not acceptable to me, nor should it be to you. I will never recommend going to his site or paying attention to any claims made there.Talkorigins refusal to correct false information about the Acambaro figurines was the last straw for me with them. They have falsehoods posted concerning numerous subjects, apparently believing that any old story will fool the average person. Their narrative about the Acambaro figurines is nothing but lies told by a disreputable "investigator" named Charles De Peso from beginning to end. Mexican authorities, local authorities and other investigators such as famed attorney and author Erle Stanley Gardner revealed De Peso to be an unscrupulous liar whose entire narrative was complete nonsense. Talkorigins uses De Peso's false report as a so-called "debunking" of the figurines. This tells me that their entire site is unreliable. I should know because I had exchanged emails with them and made a point of revealing errors on their pages that they have to this day refused to correct.When someone devises a way to be deceptive, this is frankly what we would call lying. Lies are part and parcel to the Darwinist mythology. In order to help explain Creation Science I am starting by dealing with some common lies and fallacious "fallacies" that Darwinists have made up to avoid certain things like evidence and logic.

Pretty obvious that the Knickerbockers were not actually singing and playing this song but were lip-syncing, which was typical of several of the 1960's teen-oriented rock and dance shows back then. Paul Revere and the Raiders made fun of the concept by playing obvious toy instruments in this hilarious recorded performance:Back to the point. This performance by the Raiders was not deceptive because they used toys so the audience was in on the scam if for some reason they were not aware of the lip-syncing practice common at that time. Certainly lots of pre-teens were a big part of those television audiences. Anyone familiar with music was not fooled by lip-syncing and I will give Ed Sullivan a lot of credit for allowing musicians to actually PLAY the song on his stage. Eventually live performances were preferred and viewers actually got to hear what the bands really sounded like rather than experiencing another spin of the .45 along with a bunch of guys pretending to play and sing.Darwinists try to deceive you purposefully, much like a lip-syncing band. They do not actually present conclusive evidence for their claims, they just make the claims and pretend they have stated facts. Fail!!!In discussions/debates, there are numerous ploys used by people to try to win the day for their point of view by avoiding evidence and logic. One of the common ones is the Straw Man. A definition fromMerriam-Webster Online:

Definition of STRAW MAN

1

: a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted

2

: a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction

Would it surprise you to find that Darwinists have intentionally invented several Straw Men? In discussing cosmology there are numerous such inventions. Author Washington Irving popularized the ridiculous idea that Christopher Columbus (a Christian, as it happens) set out to "sail the ocean blue" to prove that the Earth was not flat. NOBODY other than some entirely unschooled people thought this way and in fact long before Christ was born it was well known that the Earth was round. Another Straw Man is the idea that the Heliocentric Solar System was opposed by "religion" and proposed by "science." Since the great astronomers of the day were believers, this is a foolish rumor. In fact, it was a tenet of the accepted science of the day that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System and it took several proofs to convince the defenders of the ruling paradigm to accept the idea that the Sun was at the center of the Solar System. Copernicus was foremost in leading scientists, royals and the church leaders to accept this concept. Galileo gets some credit but actually he also got himself in some trouble with peripheral issues and was not as important to the modern acceptance of the idea as was Copernicus. In fact, the ancient Greeks had considered it a possibility and work by men like Kepler finally convinced the majority of scientists and others that Heliocentricity was a certainty. All three men (Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler) would be considered Theists if not Christians. In fact, many of the early scientists were priests, in part because few non-royals or clerics were given the opportunity for higher learning or even taught to read. The efforts of a few priests like Grossteste, Bacon and Martin Luther led to common people being given the chance at higher learning and Gutenberg's printing press led to the revolution of literacy for all people. Thus, it was the Reformation and not the Renaissance that caused a rapid rise in general knowledge and truly this was a rising tide that raised all ships! For it was not science that was shrugging off the shackles of ignorance, it was the individual scientists fighting to tear down the old monuments to false-but-accepted dogmas...rather like the situation today, as ID proponents and Creation scientists struggle to open the eyes of the world to the failures and fallacies of Darwinism.

One great obstacle to modern science was the old guard's familiarity and comfort with Aristotle's approach to scientific questions. The word would be Syllogism - From theFree Online Dictionary:

syl·lo·gism(sl-jzm)

n.

1. Logic A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion; for example, All humans are mortal, the major premise, I am a human, the minor premise, therefore, I am mortal, the conclusion.

2. Reasoning from the general to the specific; deduction.

3. A subtle or specious piece of reasoning.

[Middle English silogisme, from Old French, from Latin syllogismus, from Greek sullogismos, from sullogizesthai, to infer : sun-, syn- + logizesthai, to count, reckon (from logos, reason; see leg- in Indo-European roots).]

A critical problem with this method of "doing science"should be obvious to you, the 21st Century reader. The major premise must be correct or the entire chain of ideas will be wrong. Just as a misdiagnosis of a patient can lead to an "error cascade"which could result in great harm or even death, the wrong major premise or minor premise will lead to a faulty conclusion.

“I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” - David Hume as quoted on page 74 of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 45) by Lawrence Dewan.

Science before the new Theistic movement was based on Aristotle's Axiomatic principles, but men like Roger Bacon thought that scientific ideas should be tested from the ground up rather than considered from the 10,000 foot perspective of the logical mind. To observe a process and declare that the sensible idea is that it happens because of (insert concept here) was not, to men like Bacon, worthy of the glory of God nor likely to be accurate. He believed in observation and experimentation and as it happened that another Bacon, Sir Francis, would devise the formula for the Scientific Method based on Roger's ideas"He(Francis Bacon) wanted to replace the Aristotelian method of syllogism with an entirely new scientific method...Bacon believed that the most general axioms should form the end rather than the beginning of scientific inference, and his own methodology was designed to avoid Aristotle's mistake. Bacon's method proceeds along a strict hierarchy of increasing generality...in order to yield reliable information, human senses needed methodological assistance." - The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pg. 16) as edited by Markku Peltone.

by Dr. Danny Faulkner

January 10, 2013

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The first few chapters of the Bible describe what I, the author, believe to be the origin and early history of mankind, the earth, and the universe. Even a cursory reading of the Book of Genesis by anyone reasonably scientifically literate ought to result in awareness that the biblical and scientific stories of creation are markedly different. Not wanting to live in a fragmented world of the Bible on Sunday and science the rest of the week, most Christians develop some reconciliation of the two. Either this process results in a world view, or it is based upon an often tacit world view. For instance, one will usually attempt to reconcile the Bible to science or science to the Bible. It is important to understand what one believes in Genesis, because certain rules of biblical interpretation will be established here.

So, what assumptions do I make? I think that it is wrong to reconcile the Bible to science. In this book we will encounter many ideas that were once widely believed and thought beyond dispute, but were later shown to be wrong and were discarded. On the other hand, the Bible does not change. There are many today who interpret Genesis in terms of the latest scientific theories and even fads. If the history of science is any teacher, then we must conclude that many of these ideas eventually will be discarded. If we have staked out a position that Genesis teaches these ideas, then what is to become of Genesis when these ideas are abandoned? A great concern of mine is that many Christians have wedded the creation account of the Bible to the big-bang theory, the current scientific myth of the world’s creation. In a hundred years will anyone believe the big bang? If not, then what is to become of Genesis if we have tied it to the big bang?

Image courtesy of NASA

The Ant Nebula

Attempts to reconcile the Bible to modern science include, but are not limited to, the following: theistic evolution, progressive creation, the gap theory, the day-age theory, and the framework hypothesis. Theistic evolution is the belief that biological evolution, as understood by most scientists today, was God’s method of creation. Progressive creationists do not believe that different kinds of creatures evolved from other kinds, but instead think that God repeatedly intervened to instantaneously create new kinds of organisms throughout time. Extinctions then acted to eliminate many of those kinds of creatures. Thus theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists agree on when various organisms came into existence, but differ on how those organisms came into existence.

Both progressive creation and theistic evolution require vast periods of time, so some accommodation for the six days of the creation week must be made. The most common approach is the day-age theory, that is, that each of the days of the creation week were long periods of time. Some who reject both theistic evolution and progressive creation still feel compelled to allow for vast ages of millions or billions of years in the earth’s past. In an attempt to permit this, the gap theory is the belief that there was a long period of time between the first and second verses of Genesis chapter 1. Then the six literal days of the creation week commenced with the second verse. The gap theory appealed to many people who wanted to interpret the Bible as literally as possible, but the gap theory has increasingly fallen onto hard times with the rise of modern creation science.

In recent years the framework hypothesis has made large inroads among conservative Christians who take the Bible seriously. The framework hypothesis is the idea that the first ten chapters of Genesis are poetry, not history. As such, those chapters have rich meaning, but do not reflect actual history. In this view, the Bible is silent on the how and when of the origin of the world, and so the believer is free to adopt whatever modern science has to say about these questions. All of these accommodations of Genesis to modern science have difficulties, a topic that will not be further developed here.1

What is the viewpoint of this book? The days of the creation week are best understood as literal days, not long periods of time. While the Bible does not tell us the date of creation, the strong implication is that the creation was only a few thousand years ago. There is a fairly complete chain of biblical chronologies from the creation to the time of Christ. Those chronologies add up to about 4,000 years. Adding the two millennia since the time of Christ, we determine an age of the world of about 6,000 years, though some understandings of the chronologies could stretch the age by nearly a thousand years. (Note that the precision of the Ussher chronology [4004 B.C. as the date of creation] is not possible).

In any case, a faithful rendering of biblical chronologies will not allow for millions or billions of years for the age of the universe as demanded by modern science. Therefore, the approach that we take here is very different from the approach that nearly every other book on cosmology takes. At the time of the writing of this book, cosmologists generally estimate the age of the universe between 12 and 14 billion years. One particular study dated the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, plus or minus 1%. We estimate the age at about 6,000 years. One would expect that this dramatic difference in estimated age must lead to tremendous differences in cosmology. Indeed, the standard big-bang model assumes a purely physical, natural origin to the universe, while we assume that God created the world and revealed some of His process of creation in Genesis. That is, the origin of the universe was a supernatural event. This difference of opinion between theism and (at the very least practical) atheism is even more profound than the age issue.

What is Cosmology?

The word cosmology comes from the Greek words cosmos and logos, which literally mean “world” and “word.” As with the names of many sciences, logos has been generalized to mean “study of,” while cosmos is generally understood to mean the universe. So the word cosmology means the “study of the universe” as a whole. More specifically, cosmology is the “study of the structure of the universe.” A related word is cosmogony,which refers to the “study of the history of the universe.” Today the word cosmogony is not used much, and much of what is called cosmology is technically cosmogony.

A cosmology is a particular theory or statement about how the universe or some part of the universe operates. For instance, the heliocentric theory, the idea that the sun is the center of the solar system, is a cosmology. The geocentric theory, that the earth is the center of the solar system, also is a cosmology. The idea that stars are very distant suns is a cosmology too. Another example of a cosmology is Immanuel Kant’s island universe concept. At the beginning of the 20th century, many astronomers thought that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the only galaxy. Thus, they often referred to the Milky Way as “the universe.” Many faint patches of light seen through telescopes generally were thought to be clouds of gas within our galaxy. However, much earlier Kant had suggested that many of these faint objects were other galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Since these “universes” were separated by huge gulfs of space, they were compared to islands. This theory was eventually proven to be correct, as we shall see.

Image courtesy of NASA

Abell 1689 is one of the most massive galaxy clusters known.

The cosmologies that will be considered in this book will be those that are concerned with the structure of the universe as a whole. Since the mid-1960s there has been one dominant cosmology: the big bang. We will examine the historical developments and observations that led to the big-bang theory. We will discuss alternatives to the big-bang cosmology, such as the steady-state cosmology and the plasma universe. Besides the physical data, we will be very concerned with how well various cosmologies conform to biblical data. Creationists have recounted many problems with the big bang, and some of those problems will be discussed here. However, it is important that creationists go beyond criticizing non-biblical or evolutionary cosmologies and develop our own positive models. Unfortunately, only meager progress to this end can be reported at this time, but avenues of possible research will be suggested.

In this introduction let us explore some more restricted cosmologies of the past. Cosmological ideas are as old as mankind. We have no idea what kind of cosmologies Adam may have had. Many people think that since Adam and his immediate descendents lived so long (in many cases nearly a millennium), the earliest people may have developed some amazing ideas and technology. There is no evidence, but it is possible that the antediluvian society may have produced some very sophisticated cosmologies. There are records of many primitive cosmologies2from around the world. Evolutionists usually conclude that these primitive cosmologies represent the original thoughts of ancient people. From the creation standpoint we would expect that what we refer to as primitive notions are actually declines from some earlier, more advanced ideas. Given that there is no direct evidence to support this creationary conjecture, let us start with some of the earliest known cosmologies.

Ancient Cosmologies

Most primitive cosmologies start with some version of a flat earth with a sky suspended above it. The earth certainly appears flat locally, so this is not an unreasonable starting point. Most people today erroneously believe that the concept of a flat earth remained common until about the time of Christopher Columbus five centuries ago. Actually, belief in a spherical earth had been nearly universal among knowledgeable people for at least two millennia before the time of Christopher Columbus.

How did the ancients figure out that the earth was spherical? The ancient Greeks gave several arguments for the earth’s sphericity, but we will only discuss the two better ones here. The ancient Greeks knew that a lunar eclipse is the shadow of the earth falling on the moon. They also noticed that the earth’s shadow was always exactly circular in shape, regardless of the orientation of the earth at the time of the eclipse. If the earth were disk shaped, it would be round-but-flat and would cast circular shadows, but only when an eclipse occurred near midnight. For eclipses near sunrise or sunset the sun’s rays would strike a flat earth obliquely, and would produce an elliptical shadow, but not a circular one. The only shape that always casts a circular shadow is a sphere. Since all lunar eclipses showed that the earth’s shadow is consistently circular, the Greeks concluded that the earth was spherical.

Another argument for the sphericity of the earth stemmed from the travel and exploration of the Mediterranean world by ancient Greek and other mariners. There was a major trading route between Greece and Egypt. The ancients noticed that stars that were barely visible in the southern sky in Egypt were not visible at all in Greece. Conversely, stars barely above the northern horizon in Greece were not visible in Egypt. This is due to the fact that the north celestial pole is at a higher altitude, or elevation in the sky, in Greece than in Egypt. This can only happen if Greece and Egypt are at different locations along a curved surface. Today we would say that Greece and Egypt are at different latitudes. Any travel north or south revealed the same phenomenon. A similar thing can be seen in the rising or setting times of the sun as one travels east or west. For instance, there is a three-hour difference between the east and west coasts of the United States. The ancients failed to notice this time difference in east-west motion, because they lacked the accurate clocks and rapid transportation that we have today.

More than 2,000 years ago, Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer living in Alexandria, made use of this phenomenon to measure the size of the earth. Eratosthenes noticed that on the summer solstice near Aswan in modern day southern Egypt, no shadows of vertical objects were cast at noon. This is because the sun was directly overhead at noon on that date, and today we would say that this location is on the tropic of Cancer, the northern extent of the tropics. At noon on the same date (but obviously not the same year) Eratosthenes noticed that objects did cast shadows in Alexandria. The difference in the shadows at these two locations obviously meant that the two locations were on an arc, and thus the earth’s surface is curved. Eratosthenes measured the lengths of the stick and its shadow in Alexandria and used trigonometry to find that the sun made an angle of 7° with the zenith, the point directly overhead. Seven degrees is about 1/50 of the circumference of a circle, so Eratosthenes knew that the circumference of the earth was 50 times the distance between the two cities. The answer that he got was within 1% of the correct value.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

The difference in the shadows shows not only that the two locations are on an arc, but this phenomenon was used to calculate the size of the earth.

Sometimes creationists are accused of trying to introduce something akin to the flat earth. This plays upon the common misconception that until about 500 years ago nearly everyone believed in a flat earth and that the Church taught that the earth was flat. This is utter nonsense—the Church never taught that the earth was flat. Indeed, the high regard for Aristotle and other ancient Greeks by the medieval Church necessitated that ancient Greek ideas on the earth’s shape be included in the teachings of the Church. This unfair attack upon creationists can be traced to the latter half of the 19th century in an attempt to discredit those in the Church who defied the acceptance of Darwinian evolution.3

As an aside, we should consider for a moment just what was involved in the medieval Church’s adoption of ancient Greek thought. Augustine taught that at the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, it was man’s will and moral character that fell, not man’s intellect. Man was still capable of perfect reason. The Church eventually saw in Aristotle and other Greek philosophers the best of what man’s perfect intellect could produce. Arguing that all truth is God’s truth, most of ancient Greek philosophy was adopted as dogma. This is most strange, considering that all ancient Greek philosophers were pagan. If they believed in any gods, they would have been polytheists. As we shall see later, ancient Greek philosophy taught evolution and an eternal universe. Both of these should have been anathema to the Church, but instead these two heretical ideas subtly slipped into western thought.

The most obvious astronomical motion in the sky is the daily rising and setting of the sun. It does not require much thought to eventually figure out that it is the same object that rises and sets each day. Next, one can reason that the sun spends the time at night passing under the earth to rise again in the east in the morning. From this it is easy to conclude that the sun is doing the moving. In other words, the geocentric theory is a good starting model. Ancient and primitive cultures concocted various explanations for the sun’s motion. Most involved either the sun being a deity that traveled across the sky each day or an object that was ridden or propelled by a deity or other creature across the sky each day. Many cultures considered what the sun was doing as it traveled under the earth each night. All of these considerations amount to a cosmology.

Probably the next step was to notice that other objects in the sky shared in the east-to-west motion of the sun. The moon and most of the stars rise in the east and set in the west each day as well. To most people the sky appears to be round, like a sphere. Many Mediterranean cultures adopted the cosmology of the celestial sphere. This is the idea that the stars, moon, and sun are lights placed upon a hard, transparent sphere centered on the earth. Either the earth remained absolutely motionless as the sphere spun around the earth each day, or the celestial sphere remained motionless while the earth rotated each day. Either one of these options would be a geocentric model. Many people today assume that all ancient people believed that the earth did not spin, but this is not necessarily true. Once the ancients figured out the correct shape of the earth and had traveled over a few hundred miles, they recognized that at all points on the earth bodies are attracted by gravity toward the earth’s center. Therefore there was no danger in falling off the earth as it spun.

The question of strict geocentricity does not arise until motions taking quite a bit more than a single day are considered. From night to night the moon appears to move about 14° eastward with respect to the background stars. The length of time required for the moon to make one complete orbit with respect to the stars is 27⅓ days, or one sidereal month. So while the earth or celestial sphere is rapidly spinning each day, the moon is more slowly moving around the earth or celestial sphere once a month. Most ancient societies correctly deduced that this was the orbital period of the moon around the earth. Things got murkier as the motion of the sun was considered. Each day the sun moves about 1% eastward through the stars, taking one year to make one trek around the celestial sphere. The question is whether this is motion around the earth similar to that of the moon, or is it the motion of the earth around the sun? Both the geocentric and heliocentric cosmologies produce the same observed motion just described.

Most people today are under the incorrect impression that nearly all ancients believed that the sun orbited the earth because of certain philosophical biases. Actually, some ancients conducted an experiment to test which idea was true. They reasoned that if the earth orbited the sun, then the observed positions of stars on the celestial sphere ought to shift slightly as we view them from one side of the earth’s orbit to the other. This effect is called parallax, which you can demonstrate by viewing your thumb held at arm’s length with one eye and then the other eye. Your thumb will appear to shift back and forth with respect to background objects as you look with one eye and then the other. If we view nearby stars on one side of the earth’s orbit and then the other side of the orbit six months later those stars will appear to change position. Parallax is caused by a change in viewing position along what is called a baseline. Surveyors use this principle all the time to measure the distance to points that are far away. The amount of parallax shift that we see depends upon the size of the baseline (the earth’s orbit in the case of stars) and the distance to the object in question. For a given baseline, parallax will decrease with increasing distance to the object.

The ancients diligently searched for parallax, but did not find it. They could not appreciate the fact that stars are at incredible distances. The nearest star is about 275,000 times farther from us than the sun, so the total annual shift that the nearest star experiences is the equivalent of the apparent diameter of a dime viewed from about one and a half miles away! Being good scientists, they rejected the heliocentric theory in favor of the geocentric cosmology. There were a few ancients that believed the heliocentric theory anyway, primarily upon the basis that the model was simpler, but they did so against the best evidence of the time.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

Parallax diagram

The earliest mention of someone teaching the heliocentric model is Aristarchus of Samos (310–230? B.C.). Aristarchus used geometric arguments to measure the sizes of the moon and sun as well as their distances from the earth. He found that the moon was ⅓ the size of the earth and that the moon’s distance was 10 times the diameter of the earth. Actually, the moon is ¼ the size of the earth and its distance is about 30 times the diameter of the earth. Aristarchus measured the sun as 7 times bigger than the earth and its distance was 200 times the diameter of the earth. The modern values are 109 and nearly 12,000. Still, these were remarkable measurements that were quoted for centuries afterward. Since the sun is much larger than the earth, Aristarchus reasoned that it was more logical to conclude that the earth orbited the sun rather than the other way around. He explained the lack of parallax by concluding that the stars are very distant, which is, of course, correct.

Heliocentric and Geocentric Cosmologies

The path that the sun appears to follow along the celestial sphere each year is called the ecliptic. The moon’s orbit is inclined to the ecliptic a little more than five degrees. Of the few thousand stars visible to the naked eye, the ancient astronomers found that nearly all of them remained fixed on the celestial sphere. The only exceptions were five fairly bright stars that they called wandering stars. The Greek name meaning “wandering star” has come down to us asplanet. Since all of the planets orbit the sun in nearly the same plane as the earth, the motions of the planets are always near the ecliptic.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

Geocentric diagram

While the planets moved close to the ecliptic, they seemed to follow erratic motions, which suggested the property of volition. Therefore, most ancient cultures conferred the status of deity upon the five planets, along with the sun and the moon. Our names for the five naked-eye planets come from the Roman pantheon: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. With the discovery of Uranus, the first telescopic planet, in the eighteenth century, the practice of using Roman names was continued.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

Heliocentric diagram

The motion of the planets among the stars is usually from west to east. This is called direct, or prograde, motion. However from time to time the direction reverses so that the planets travel westward. This motion is called indirect or retrograde motion. Soon afterward, the motion returns to direct. For Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which orbit the sun farther from it than the earth, retrograde motion occurs when they are nearly opposite the sun on the celestial sphere. Mercury and Venus orbit the sun closer than the earth does, and retrograde motion occurs when they move from being east of the sun in the evening sky to being west of the sun in the morning sky. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are called superior planets, while Mercury and Venus are called inferior planets.

How can retrograde motion be explained with the heliocentric and geocentric cosmologies? The heliocentric model can explain it very easily, as shown below. The orbital speeds of planets decrease with increasing distance from the sun. When the earth at the position marked “opposition” passes a superior planet, the faster motion of the earth causes the superior planet to appear to fall behind. This is retrograde motion. At other times the combined motion of the superior planet and the earth cause the planet to appear to move in the prograde direction. When an inferior planet passes between the earth and the sun, it is the earth that is left behind, which causes the inferior planet to appear to move backward for a short while. The simplicity of this rather straightforward explanation has always been the primary argument in favor of the heliocentric theory.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

How is retrograde motion explained in the geocentric theory? The most complete explanation comes from Ptolemy, a second-century Alexandrian astronomer. He wrote a compilation of all ancient astronomy in a book that has come down to us by the title The Almagest. Since no original or copies of earlier astronomy texts exist, most of what we know of ancient Greek astronomy comes from this source. Ptolemy could have simply had the planets move on erratic paths along the ecliptic, but this would have offered no predictive power. That is, one could not anticipate nor predict where planets would be at any time in the past or future. Furthermore, the ancients reasoned that objects in the sky must follow perfect motion. The most perfect shape was the circle, and the most perfect motion was uniform. Therefore the ancient Greeks thought that planets must move uniformly along circular paths.

Ptolemy managed to explain retrograde motion by having each planet move upon two circular paths simultaneously. A planet moved along a smaller circle called an epicycle, while the epicycle moved around the earth along a larger circle called a deferent. A deferent went completely around the sky along the ecliptic. By adjusting the sizes of the circles and the rates of motion Ptolemy was able to reproduce direct and indirect motion of the planets pretty well. See thedrawing on page 12 for an illustration of how this system works.

Further refinements allowed this system to reproduce planetary motions. For example, the planets do not follow simple back and forth motions when they retrograde. Because the orbits of the planets are slightly inclined to the ecliptic, the motions are flattened loops or flattened sshapes, depending upon at which portions of the orbits that retrograde motions occur. One can reproduce the looping motion by introducing smaller epicycles perpendicular to the other epicycles already discussed.

Ptolemy also found that he got better agreement when he placed the earth off-center of each deferent. This was an attempt to match the elliptical orbits of the planets, a fact elucidated by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) as his first law of planetary motion in the early seventeenth century. The elliptical orbits of the planets are close enough to being circles that off-center circles can approximate them. Kepler’s second law dictates the rates at which planets move in their orbits. The result is that planets move most rapidly at perihelion, the point of closest approach to the sun, and most slowly at aphelion, the point of greatest distance from the sun. Ptolemy mimicked this by having each planet move at a uniform angular rate with respect to a point called the equant. The equant is collinear with the earth and the center of the deferent, opposite the center of the deferent from the earth, and equal distance from the center as the earth.

Medieval and Renaissance Cosmologies

The Ptolemaic system worked very well to predict planetary positions. By the time of Kepler, the errors between the model and reality were remarkably small. Further refinements (epicycles upon epicycles) could be and were added to improve the agreement. It is not clear if Ptolemy meant for his model to be taken as an absolute statement of how the universe really worked, or if it was merely a computational device. Whatever Ptolemy intended, by medieval times most people thought that was actually how the celestial world operated. Despite its ability to predict planetary positions, the Ptolemaic system was very cumbersome. It is said that when one late medieval monarch was instructed on the Ptolemaic cosmology, he commented that had he been present at the creation he could have offered God a few suggestions.

The complexity of the Ptolemaic cosmology led to the pursuit of simpler explanations. In 1542, nearly one hundred and fifty years before Newton’s work, Nicklaus Copernicus (1473–1543) published his book on the heliocentric cosmology. Copernicus is usually given credit for originating or at least establishing heliocentricity. This is not exactly true, because many others had previously believed in heliocentricity. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his development of the model. Using the heliocentric theory Copernicus found the correct orbital periods of the five planets then known. He also found the distances of the five planets from the sun. Copernicus expressed these distances in astronomical units (AU). One AU is the average distance between the earth and the sun. It would be many years before anyone would know the length of the AU in miles or kilometers, but this is not important, since often all that matters is the relative distances.

Neither of the sizes nor periods of the planets’ orbits had been known previously. Kepler needed this information when he determined his third law of planetary motion in the early 16th century. By the time of Newton in the latter part of the 17th century, the geocentric theory was largely discarded in favor of the heliocentric theory. Direct evidence of the heliocentric option came about much later (aberration of starlight and parallax), but the debate was settled to the satisfaction of most people from the argument of simplicity. The principle of Occam’s razor dictates that when confronted with two explanations that equally explain data, the simpler explanation is usually the correct one.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)

An alternate geocentric model should be mentioned. Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a famous Danish astronomer who made many very accurate measurements of stellar and planetary positions. The most remarkable part of his story is that he did this all without optical aid, because he died just a few short years before the invention of the telescope. Tycho realized how unwieldy the Ptolemaic cosmology was, but he was unwilling to totally let go of geocentricism, so he devised a sort of compromise cosmology. In the Tychonic model, the other planets orbit the sun, but the sun in turn orbits the earth. (See illustration on page 16.) This is not as different from the heliocentric model as it may seem at first. The Tychonic cosmology is mathematically a coordinate transformation between the earth and sun. There is a modern geocentric movement that embraces this system, and includes a small minority of recent creationists. The author of this monograph does not endorse this movement.4

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

The Tychonic Model

Contrary to popular belief, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) did not invent the telescope, though he was the first to put the telescope to astronomical use. With his telescope Galileo saw several things that challenged conventional cosmological thoughts of the day. Galileo saw mountains and craters on the moon and spots on the sun, though these bodies were supposed to be perfect and hence without blemish. He saw many thousands of stars too faint to be seen with the naked eye. At the time many thought that there were only 1,022 stars. This stems from the belief that all things worth knowing were known to the ancients and that Ptolemy had cataloged 1,022 stars. Of course Ptolemy had not claimed that he had cataloged all stars. Indeed, his catalog had more stars than those cataloged by earlier Greek astronomers; he had merely cataloged all the stars that he could easily identify. If the authorities had merely considered the words of God in His covenant with Abram recorded in Genesis 15:5 rather than relying upon a garbled understanding of Ptolemy’s words, they would have realized that the stars are without number.

This episode concerning the number of stars sheds light upon what actually transpired when Galileo ran afoul of the Church on the issue of geocentricism. The usual understanding today is that Galileo and others got into trouble for teaching heliocentricism because Church leaders thought that the Bible taught geocentricism. Scripture was rarely used in the prosecution. Instead, the works of Ptolemy were used. This is a strange approach if the question is really theological or religious in nature. We can understand this by recalling that during the middle ages all authority was collected in one place: the Church. The authority included religion, society, government, business, education, and science. A king could not rule, people could not marry or have businesses, and one could not attend school without the blessing of the Church. Most art and science was pursed with the patronage of the Church. Copernicus was a priest, and Galileo had much interaction with the Church. When Galileo and others proposed the heliocentric theory, it was not so much that they were challenging religious doctrine, as it was that they were challenging the science of the day. In other words, the conflict was over old science versus new science, not religion versus science. Given this reality, if one wishes to make a parallel between the Galileo episode of four hundred years ago to the rise of modern creation science, the creationists are to be identified with Galileo. Of course this is just the opposite of the usually intended parallel.

What evidence did Galileo offer for the heliocentric theory? He discovered and named the four large satellites orbiting Jupiter. He realized that he had found four astronomical bodies that did not revolve around the earth, in contradiction to the dogma of the day. Defenders of geocentricism had claimed that if the earth moved, the moon would be left behind. That argument was undermined by the fact that in either the geocentric or heliocentric theories, Jupiter must move, yet its satellites managed to keep up with it. Galileo went on to suggest that Jupiter and its moons represented a sort of miniature solar system. Galileo also saw that Venus went through a complete range of phases, which it could only do if it orbited the sun. This ruled out the Ptolemaic cosmology, though it could not rule out the Tychonic model.

The Nature of the Universe

Given the important role that ancient Greek thought had upon the development of science, it is important to explore their ideas about the universe as a whole. The ancient Greeks thought that the universe was eternal, without beginning or end. This assumption became so deeply ingrained that it is difficult for us to totally understand why they believed it. One possibility is that they had a hard time conceiving of the beginning of the universe. If the universe had no beginning, then that nasty problem may be avoided. That sort of thinking has survived until today. The Greek gods were quite limited in their power—they were not much more than supermen. These gods were finite beings in a transcendent universe. They were born at some time in the past, and presumably would eventually die. The Greeks could not comprehend a Creator that transcended the universe.

Another explanation why the Greeks believed in an eternal universe is that they were evolutionists. Contrary to popular misconception, evolution did not start with Charles Darwin’sOrigin of Species in 1859, or even with Lamarck a few decades earlier. The idea of spontaneous generation goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. They also realized that the universe tends to go from order to disorder. However they believed that vortices stirred portions of the universe in such a fashion that order occasionally arose. Variations on this theme still survive in Western thinking today.

Augustine, and later Thomas Aquinas, had a strong influence upon the development of the thinking of the Church and the philosophy of Western thought and science. Augustine brought in many ancient Greek ideas, and “Christianized” many of the formerly pagan concepts. While Augustine may have not believed in an eternal universe himself, his lead allowed that sort of idea to remain in vogue. The big-bang cosmology of the 20th century reintroduced the concept of the universe having a beginning. This was a clean break from the thinking since the 17th century when what we now know as science began to develop. Though some scientists in that interval may have believed in a recent origin of the earth, many of them undoubtedly believed in the eternality of the universe as a whole.

Image courtesy of Bryan Miller

Isaac Newton

As an example of someone who believed in the eternality of the universe, consider Isaac Newton. After Newton devised his law of gravity, he realized that all of the matter in the universe attracted all the other matter. If the matter in the universe were finite in size, then there must be a center of mass. If the universe has a center of mass, then the center must be the point toward which all matter in the universe is attracted. If the universe is eternal, as Newton apparently believed, then there should have been ample time for all matter to be amalgamated at the center of mass. This obviously has not happened.

Newton solved this dilemma not by scrapping the eternality of the universe, but by hypothesizing that the universe was infinite in extent. He reasoned that if the universe extended infinitely in all directions, then there would be no center of mass. All matter would be equally attracted in all directions, so that there would be no collapse of all matter into a single heap. The eternality and infinite size of the universe persisted for two centuries. We shall see that with general relativity this option is not viable in the general case.

Toward Modern Cosmology

About a century after Newton, a clear picture of the structure of our galaxy, the Milky Way, began to emerge, largely through the work of the German-born English astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822). Herschel’s model was called the grindstone model, because its distribution of stars was in a round, flat shape similar to a grindstone. This model placed the sun near the center of the Milky Way, not because of philosophical presuppositions, but because that was where the observational data placed it. In every direction along the plane of the Milky Way, Herschel’s counts of stars at ever-fainter degrees of brightness changed as one would expect if the sun were at the center. It appeared that we were seeing to the edge of our galaxy in every direction.

In the early part of the 20th century, the American astronomer Harlow Shapley (1885–1972) found that the sun was not at the center of our galaxy. He did this by studying the distribution of globular star clusters. Shapley plotted the hundred or so globular clusters then known and found that while their common center was along the plane of the Milky Way, that center was many thousands of light years away from the sun. Since each globular cluster contains at least 50,000 stars, the globular star cluster system as a whole must have a mass many millions of times that of the sun. Shapley argued that it made more sense for the center of the globular cluster system to be the true center of the Milky Way rather than the sun.

Why star counts made it appear as if the sun were at the center of the galaxy remained a mystery for over a dozen years. In 1930 the existence of interstellar dust was discovered. Dust scatters, and thus dims, the light from stars. The amount of scattering is dependent upon the wavelength, or color, of the light. Blue light (shorter wavelength) is scattered more than red light (longer wavelength) so that the transmitted light is changed in color. Viewed through dust, a star appears fainter and redder than it ordinarily would, and if there is enough dust, the star may not be visible at all. This process is well understood, and astronomers routinely correct for this sort of thing today. There is so much dust in the plane of the galaxy that it is not possible to see completely to the edge, at least not in the visible part of the spectrum. We now recognize that obscuration by dust explains why star counts had incorrectly suggested that we were at the center of the Milky Way.

Shapley played a role in another cosmological debate, though this time on the losing side. In 1920 Shapley debated Heber Curtis in Washington, DC, in a program sponsored by the American Academy of Science. At question was Kant’s island universe theory. Most astronomers had thought for a long time that the Milky Way was the only galaxy. In fact, the words galaxy and universe were used synonymously. Through the telescope thousands of faint patches of light can be seen. These were called nebulae (singular: nebula), after the Greek word for cloud, because these objects often appear cloudy. With larger telescopes some of the nebulae can be resolved into stars, and these became known as star clusters. However, most of the nebulae remained fuzzy.

Many of the nebulae had flat, circular or elliptical shapes that reminded Kant and others of Herschel’s grindstone model. Therefore some thought that these might be very distant “universes” like the Milky Way. However, most astronomers interpreted the nebulae as clouds of gas within the Milky Way. The gas cloud theory remained more popular, largely because it fit so well with Laplace’s nebular hypothesis. The nebular hypothesis was the idea that the solar system formed from a flat, rotating disk of gas. The modern theory of solar system formation is the intellectual descendent of the nebular hypothesis. A hundred years ago astronomers used the existence of “spiral nebulae” as proof of the nebular hypothesis.

In their debate Curtis argued for the island universe, while Shapley argued that the Milky Way was the sole galaxy. By all accounts Shapley won the debate, primarily because the data as then understood better supported his position. His victory was short-lived, because just four years later, in 1924, Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) confirmed the island universe theory. Hubble did this with very long photographic exposures of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) made with the Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope, then the largest telescope in the world. The photographs revealed faint individual stars in M31 that were identified as normally very bright giant stars. This could only be true if M31 were extremely far away (at the time, Hubble estimated its distance as nearly a million light years away), which placed M31 well outside of the Milky Way. Because M31 appeared to be the largest and brightest of the spiral or elliptical “nebulae,” it followed that the others probably were even more distant galaxies, a conclusion that soon was confirmed.

Image courtesy of NASA

The above picture was taken by the COBE satellite and shows the plane of our galaxy in infrared light.

Shapley’s correct positioning of the sun off-center in our galaxy has been hailed as the continuance of the Copernican revolution. Just as Copernicus showed that the earth was not the center of the solar system, we are not even the center of the Milky Way. Hubble’s confirmation of the island universe theory is often taken as the ultimate triumph of the Copernican revolution. Not only are we not the center of the solar system or even of the galaxy, but also the Milky Way is merely a tiny island amidst a vast archipelago of countless galaxies. Many believe that this suggests that mankind is just the result of a relatively minor cosmic accident and that life must have arisen countless times in the universe.

Others go so far as to conclude that the Copernican revolution has somehow disproved the Bible. Of course this erroneously supposes that the Bible claims that we are the center of the universe or at least in some preferred geographical location. While it is clear that mankind is the center of God’s attention, that does not mean nor does the Bible claim that we are at some unique geographic position. The Bible does not address that issue.

In fact, this last step in the Copernican revolution should cause Christians to ponder the fact that despite our apparently insignificant location, the LORD has seen fit to concern himself with us. The modern view of the universe also allows us to better appreciate the mighty power of the Creator. We now better appreciate more than ever before that the heavens do declare the glory of God.

Checking Your Understanding

What is cosmology? What is cosmogony?

What was one proof that the ancients used to show that the earth was spherical?

What did Eratosthenes do?

What is the geocentric model?

What was Copernicus’s great contribution?

What was the Tychonic model?

What were two discoveries that Galileo made with his telescope that challenged the thinking of his day?

Footnotes

A good discussion of the gap and day-age theories may be found in W.W. Fields, Unformed and Unfilled (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978). A partial refutation of progressive creation may be found in M. Van Bebber and P.S. Taylor, Creation and Time: A Report on the Progressive Creationist Book by Hugh Ross (Gilbert, AZ: Eden Communications, 1994), or see H.M. Morris and J.D. Morris, Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1989), p. 7–10; or A.S. Kulikovsky, “God’s Rest in Hebrews 4:1–11,” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 13(2): 61–62 (1999). Theistic evolution has been critiqued in many places, such as H.M. Morris,Scientific Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1985), p. 215–220. A discussion of all of these compromising ideas may be found in D. Hall and J. Pipa, editors, Did God Create in Six Days? “From Chaos to Cosmos: A Critique of the Non-Literal Interpretations of Genesis 1:1–2:3,” by J.A. Pipa (Taylors, SC: Southern Presbyterian Press, 1999), p. 153ff. Back

Some Christians go so far as to think that God gave Adam the complete story of redemption in the form of the constellation and star names that have been passed down to us, though garbled a bit. This idea has become known as the “gospel in the stars.” For instance, see Frances Rolleston, Mazzaroth (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001), originally printed 1863; E.W. Bullinger, Witness of the Stars (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1967), originally published 1893; J.A. Seiss, The Gospel in the Stars (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1972), originally published 1882; or J. Kennedy, The Real Meaning of the Zodiac (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Coral Ridge Ministries, 1989). For a critical discussion of the gospel in the stars, see D.R. Faulkner, “Is There a Gospel in the Stars?” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(2): 169–172 (1998). Back

For a good refutation of the myth that the Medieval Church taught a flat earth, see J.B. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (New York: Praeger, 1991). Back

For a critical evaluation of modern geocentricism, see D.R. Faulkner, “Geocentricism and Creation,” Creation TJ 15(2): 110–121 (2001). Back

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So in fact the birth of modern science was midwifed by Theists and Christians and Deists who abandoned the Aristotlean axiomatic way of scientific explanations in favor of dependence on experiments and observations to investigate hypotheses methodically. We see that while Bacon actually formulated the Scientific Method, scientists from antiquity used the principles of the method to determine things like the diameter of the Earth and other such discoveries as listed by Dr. Faulkner. Both Geocentricism and the Flat Earth concept were falsified by use of the scientific method even before it was explicitly spelled out by Sir Francis himself.

But what of the Universe itself?

There are quite a few ideas that have been considered as plausible means by which the Universe was brought into existence. But do not think that the Big Bang is in any way a fact in any way, shape or form. It is a very crude concept that does not withstand scrutiny...unless you like your equations 96% evidence-free? Secular cosmologists have actually been more axiomatic than scientific in this particular instance, preferring a basically evidence-free explanation to a more logical one that involves the Creator God.Will we be able to comprehend the making of the Universe within my lifetime? Do we have the innate intellect to be able to understand the "how" aspect of the event? Perhaps not, but for me I see that evidence piles up in other scientific disciplines and it piles up on the Creation side, so I expect that to be more apparent as time goes on in the world of cosmology as well. As far as the Solar System goes, space missions have already proved that the Solar System is far younger than Darwinists thought possible. So perhaps the Big Bang will prove to be a dud as well before I leave this mortal coil?

Now we have come to another Straw Man. Darwinists claim that Naturalism must be inserted into the Scientific Method. Did Francis Bacon do this? No! In fact Bacon assumed that God created all things and therefore all things could be investigated logically and methodically in order to discover secrets of their operations and forces, etc. While it is true we can only experiment on things in one particular time or place, this does not limit supernatural explanations for the origin of natural things. Bacon was simply doing good science. Ancient scientist-philosophers like Archimedes and Aristarchus absolutely performed experiments and observed phenomena to do bottom-up investigation per the Bacon methodology. Let's tell it like it is...When you are debating or discussing an issue and the other side resorts to deliberately deceptive arguments, then you know they cannot win on the evidence. So they will lie to you. If you understand how they do it, you will not be fooled by it. So the first kind of deception to expect from Darwinists and be ready to refute is the Straw Man. I close with the rather humorous and typical 1960's lip-synced performance by the Castaways of "Liar, Liar."

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour